Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.)
—Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Once we realized She could speak, there was a General Sense of Euphoria across the globe—not Peace, Love & Harmony of course, no, but something much more practical, valuable, lucrative, for Her Realness here on earth meant there was Real Money to be made.
There were The Haters of course. Some claimed She was a hologram, a lobbyist for Such & Such industry in an usually tacky costume, or even a genetic pariah from some former despotic royal family, and no one really cared that She had learned to speak Every Single Language on Earth, even those endangered or extinct, nor did we care that She could tell us what that Whale Song Business really meant, or why the bees were really dying, or how we could put An End to Poverty, War and Famine. In fact, shortly after She opened her mouth, She was accused of being a Communist, Anti-American, Un-American to her rotten core, See Something & Say Something, and you better believe we did.
Her lawyer of leather skirts and exquisite insults realized immediately She was going to have an Image Problem. Even Aliens—no, Especially Aliens—were not given a free pass in Indiscriminate Displays of Sincerity and Good Will, which as we all know cannot possibly exist in this world but are holograms and tacky costumes that hide Ulterior Motives. Her lawyer hired Her a whole team of agents, stylists, publicists, and numerous bodyguards to reboot Her Image as she booked Her magazine covers, television interviews, YouTube interview series, each one More Exclusive.
At first She was made to appear to heavy wigs, heavy coats and heavy shoes—mind you, it was the middle of August—to hide Her appearance. She was shot only in black and white photos. These measures only provoked The Haters further. They attempted to hack her Snapchat and Instagram accounts, which did not yet exist, although Her Facebook Public Persona was up and running, which is All Lies in these Civilized Times. Twitter Activists everywhere called for Her Disrobing; they wanted a Complete Revealing of Everything About Her, and set about Campaign Hashtags Around the Globe in the name of Truth, even asking for the Alien emoji to be banned until She answered their terms and conditions, God Bless America.
Perhaps this would have been cruel if it had happened to You or Me, but remember She Is Not a Real Person, and even if all this madness made Her nervous, surely the lawyer must’ve assured Her that Here on Earth, you must Crescendo to what is Most Real in order for the Most Realness which is Real Money to be Made. She assumed (wrongly) Her agent meant this would take years to do, the Crescendoing.
It happened in less than a week.
It took less than a week, given that we live in Civilized Times where we’ve almost abolished the cruelties that are Waiting in Line, or waiting for letters for months from Pen Pals Far Away, we are a Kinder, Gentler people without Call-Waiting, Cassette-Tape Answering Machines, Drive-Thru Film Developing in which you had to keep The Negatives, there’s no need at all for Having to Talk to People in Person, to get What We Want Now.
Unless She’s fooled us and has been wearing a Space Suit of Some Sort, She appeared completely nude in a Tell-All Exclusive Photo Spread in which She told Her Story, only there were no words at all, no useless text to get in the way of a magnificent rotund courtyard whose centered spurting fountain of gasping goldfish was surrounded by four gilded cages of rare Guyana Hawk-heads, the only parrots that can raise a fan of feathers over their heads and although the gesture can signify contentment and lends an air of distinguished wisdom, in the Behind the Scenes video of the shoot we learned the birds frequently lunged at Her, after cooing and cowering under Her lawyer’s neck when perched on her hand, and it’s rumored the parrots weren’t real at all, but Specially-Engineered Robot Parrots spied on Her in the common tongue of disquiet.
It should be mentioned here that it’s not like She was kept Against Her Will, remember it was She who Fell Upon Our Earth, and She was free to Come and Go as She pleased, but while she is here, why not have Watchful Eyes Upon Her as she creeps around Our domain to feel our cool morning against Her Skin which Her agent had bleached with the mildest chemicals, to make her appear fluorescent and therefore More Unearthly, although we learned later she complained it gave her a headache that never went away—longer than Her Fame, but more on that in A Minute—and interrupted Her sleep as She tossed and turned sleeping on the floor of hotel rooms, a habit that Her lawyer would lament dried out her skin.
At first photographers jumped the high fences of whatever Celebrity Home She stayed in and at first this surprised Her—the rush of bodies, the flashing and snapping and clicking of cameras—and then She became used to them and the roaring cities with their array of writers, poets, artists, actors and trust-fundarians all whom invited Her into their Lofts and Converted Firehouses and Hot Sauce Only Bars and celebrated Her Liberation from Anonymity—which they made Their Shared Struggle—and these artists spoke of their own dreams as if She were a genie who they themselves had freed from Her bottle, and She sat there in silence, trying not to fall asleep, or whatever She did as sleep, and it must have been somewhat a relief that it was yet again another time She did not to speak.
Who knows really when Her Decline started, but after just a couple of weeks, when it was time to guest star on the local news as a weatheralien, somewhere along the way, while staying as a Guest in a Celebrity Home, She hid in the walk-in closet in front of the huge stain-glass window which depicted a likeness of Schongauer’s St. Anthony Plagued by Demons, as the sunlight passed through like gunfire and struck Her body damaged by the once-a-week bleaching, and it took calling The Police to get her out, just The Threat of Calling The Police, for we imagine that she remembered her first few days On Earth, the always-invisible snipers who hid in the mountains and threatened Such Good Men, and she did not want to remain Hidden as them, and she did not want to meet again Such Good Men.
But She never adjusted to us, to our customs and ways of life, as sometimes Her Kind do cannot. She never got used to saying goodbye and giving Her Best to the personal chef that Her agent would fire every week, through the Her interpreter protested that he hadn’t been hired to fire staff and who didn’t even have wallpaper in the studio apartment that he shared with three other students whom taught Her to shave Her legs for the short black pants that had itched, although She didn’t have any hair, any hair at all actually, and She didn’t actually need an interpreter, considering that She spoke Every Language Alive and Extinct, and it was the bleach that was causing her skin to erode. She didn’t need a personal chef either because She didn’t need food as we do. We actually have no idea what She did for sustenance, but since She never asked us for anything, we believed at least she was a Self-Reliant creature, God Bless America.
It goes that She started again on us, which means She Started Speaking, you know, about how to save the rainforests, clean up the oceans, find an energy source other than oil, but her team assured Her that She Had The Job A Million Aliens Would Kill For, and that any Views or Actions Socio-Political could damage Her Image as a Miracle of God and besides there were already a few Inquisitions into the Nature of Her Existence, various factions that believed She was a demon if not the Devil, or whatever Unclean Spirit, and when She began to protest anyway, that we were ruining our world, Her own lawyer got involved and tried to reason with Her. When that didn’t work, Her lawyer said no one was going to take Her Seriously Anyway, just look at the supposedly Robot-Spy-Parrots, citing that even real parrots can speak the words of any language, but it’s only Imitation without Understanding, so, so what if She speaks Every Language Alive and Extinct, it doesn’t mean a thing, understand?
Besides, the lawyer went on, She had a much bigger problem: After nearly two months on earth, She was becoming Old News. Couldn’t she do something more than just be photographed and thinking Herself so important? Surely She had a supernatural power they could use—when only a few days ago, She was warned not to do anything than simply be, having The Job A Million Aliens Would Kill For. Her lawyer went on about the range of Necessary Emotions She should learn to display, the range of Necessary Antics like Leaving the Club Late Drunk Driving Race with Paparazzi and Pleading Guilty, only to Stay in Jail for a Few Hours anyway, but think of the Necessary Emotions She could practice in a televised courtroom trial, and then there was a possible color change overall, not only Her skin, but Wigs Worn Askew and Clothing Shoplifted, maybe that could work although She was Already A Passing Thing.
It had been so long since She was given a chance to speak that She Had Nothing to Say to this, and She listened as her lawyer heaved a Long Sigh and put Her on hold, and then disconnected the line.
Only an hour after Her lawyer dropped Her then her interpreter didn’t accompany Her to the movie premier of the Celebrity whose Celebrity House She was a guest, nor did She attend the premier because She was not allowed On the Premises of the theater, nor was She allowed to return to the Celebrity House having also been barred from Those Premises as well.
An hour later, the media caught wind of this and smeared all over Every Screen of Every Browser Opened Ever a heartrending exclusive of a pitiful, dried-up media whore whose best days, which had been nothing more than an exercise in humiliation for the sake of fame, were long past, and handed down Her sentence of no longer being Relevant Enough to grace the front page. And thus, like the most graceful—or rather, compliant—of Passing Things, She decided to Go Away.
And so She set off with half-hearted determination to start Her Life on Earth Over, now that She knew such necessary, cursed measures existed, and it’s said it was then that she finally used Her Supernatural Powers, to enter the Celebrity House she’d been barred from entering only to set free the parrots who might have been real after all. It is said they flew out into the sky like precious gems abandoned to the elements that, after a life of being caught, broken, and caged, would defeat them in a matter of days.
She followed the flock as far as She could before they broke apart in the four cardinal directions and abandoned the blanched, solitary, trembling figure who’d once known the tranquility of mountains and feared the Good Men as if they were always keeping watch from some place hidden, but never had She had felt such despondency until She reached the water again, only this time it was the Pacific ocean, on a crowded beach in which no one saw Her, although She was in Plain Sight. She put one foot in the water, and felt Her body tighten up as the cold water set a chill over Her. She steadied Herself and raised Her other foot. She walked and walked, Her feet always touching the sand, until She was well under water, without needing to swim, or to breathe, or to speak, and She kept walking.
Here her story diverges into two paths. The first one goes that a killer whale swam right at Her and ate Her frail, single form in one bite, a story that it is not only Widely Accepted but also a Way Out for Passing Things, before they’re hunted down and their worth wiped out by hyperbole and caricatures, granting each a Quite, Dignified Death and hopeful elimination from our memories.
The second—and please take with a Grain of Salt, for we almost sure that a Certain Female Poet wrote this into existence—the second goes that after trying to Live as a Human Absolutely Exhausted Her, She lay down at the bottom of the ocean, far, far away from the shore and any hope of human recovery, in order to die, knowing that She had come to earth from Far Away and Alone, and had failed, now uncapitalized, still unnamed.
It goes that as she lay dying, all the whales in the world heard her, and they spoke to each other, as whales do—how, we don’t know, and certainly not that Certain Troublesome Poet who dreamed up this scenario—and they sent One of The Best of their Kind to reach her, and which whale did all the whales decide is The Best? One killer whale who’d known humans a close range; one who had once been their captive. One who had been forced for years to do tricks, and perhaps even appeared in a few films. One whom we decided to free, one day, and so he was freed, but in the open water, he lived in solitude, having lived without a pod or even one other whale companion. He called himself a once-whale. Other whales had been trying to reach him for years, and only now could they reach him.
And so this once-whale plunged deep into the water, and found Her there curled up at the bottom of the sea. He nudged her until she was on his back, and he brought her up to the surface. She did not grasp for breath. She did not shake with fear, or cry the tears that, having lived so long in the human world, she wanted to. She held onto the once-whale. Her words that followed were simple.
“I—I can’t do anything,” she said in broken whale.
“I have been you,” the once-whale had replied in a language just as broken, “And I’m as real to them as you are,” and it’s said that she never let go of him again, or he of her, and today when the sun falls deep into the ocean and radiates the water from within, it is them, the lanterns and candles once blown out in storms and tempests—it is them lighting the darkest and deepest parts of this world alone that we humans will never inhabit.
This is the second part in a two-part series on alienness, gender & otherness. Read Part 1 Here,